THE MOST LAMEST THREAD OF 2010

[Sneaky]

http://infamousones.tumblr.com/

pointless internet social media for your consumption.

oh this is mine btw

[Bobbias]

Following.

[Spectere]

Spec, what's the name of the city map near the end of Doom 2 with all the Reverent near the end on a building side?

I wouldn't say that it's near the end of the game (since the last "chapter" technically takes place in Hell) but I believe you're referring to Downtown.  I want to say that's map 13-ish.

That's one of my favorites.

[OmegaOmni]

Holy shit now you can buy in game tf2 items with real money.

[K-Mann]

Man everyones jumpin on the blogging train now.

I would, but I'm always scared about forgetting about the site and never posting. My last journal (livejournal lmfao) was a waste of time... I had a blog at one point that I think I posted twice in. And I deleted my facebook account because I hadn't posted in it for over 2 years.

So I'll think about it.

In the mean time, new avatar. I am also listening to the new Linkin Park album, so I may post about it in the Music Thread.

[Ulti]

Spec, what's the name of the city map near the end of Doom 2 with all the Reverent near the end on a building side?

That's MAP13, downtown, I think.

[OmegaOmni]

We has a spam bot...spekture we need your mighty admin powers.

[MortifiedocAlot]

Holy shit now you can buy in game tf2 items with real money.

Yeah, you can spend 23 dollars on a fake ingame hat.

[Kulli]

best part of living in Hawaii?

getting Monday Night Football at 2:30 in the afternoon.

[Spectere]

Sometimes I really like CRT monitors.

I have a 17" Dell M780 monitor connected to my Mac.  Not a horrible monitor, but it sure isn't an UltraScan.  Its, quote, maximum addressable resolution, unquote, is 1600x1200 at 60hz.  Right now I have it set to 1792x1344 at 60hz and everything is very clear and readable.

Similarly, the secondary monitor on my PC is a 17" Dell P793.  It has a crystal-clear DiamondTron display, could no doubt kill a man if you were to drop it on his head, and has quite possibly the richest color I've ever seen from a VGA monitor.  Oh, that thing can also very easily display 1920x1080.  Not bad for a small monitor that predates 1080p as a common resolution.

Sometimes analog is better.  CRTs don't give a shit about pixels.  They don't have no stinkin' native resolution.  You just set the timings and, as long as they're within the bounds, it'll happily draw things as sharply as it can, and as long as your display isn't a piece of shit, it'll be crystal clear.  LCDs will never, ever have that awesome trait.  Playing a game that can't run at your native resolution?  Welcome to blur-o-vision, sucka.

On the other hand, at least 26" 1080p LCD monitors don't weigh in excess of 100 pounds.  My P793 weighs about 40 pounds.  A good 21" CRT weighs in at 70-80 pounds.  My 26" LCD weighs 30 pounds.  Yay?

[Bobbias]

Well there are limits... But yeah, until you hit them, everything is nice.

How do your force your monitor to display past it's manufacturer's limits?

[Spectere]

As I said, resolution means precisely nil on CRTs.  As long as your horizontal and vertical timings are within range and you have a decent quality tube, you can hit literally any resolution that operates within those timings.  Some programs even did that to their benefit.  For instance, ZSNES offers (or at least used to offer in the DOS version) 256x256 and 512x512 resolutions for any video card that it could convince to display it.

About the only thing that I miss from the NVIDIA drivers is the ability to easily add custom resolutions.  If you do that, you can essentially force the video card to try to sync the monitor at any given resolution.  The thing that I didn't miss from the NVIDIA drivers was their lame resolution detection.  Literally, the only 16:10 resolution it gave my monitor was 1920x1200, which was just bloody fantastic if I was running a game that the card couldn't handle well.  That combined with its horrendously inconsistent LCD scaling (it occasionally stretched 4:3 images to 16:10 in such a way that it prevented me from overriding it via my monitor menu) literally made custom resolutions a requirement.

ATI doesn't have any built-in facility to add in custom timings, but it does let you ignore the monitor's EDID information.  If I ignore that, I can crank the P793 (the EDID for that monitor indicates a maximum resolution of 1600x1200) to 1920x1200 without having to do any real work.  I should download PowerStrip and see if I can make some ridiculously whack resolutions.  Or not, since PowerStrip doesn't support the R800 series.  I'd have to override the monitor's EDID with a custom one if I wanted to do that.

[Bobbias]

Why would you want a square resolution in ZSNES? The Snes didn't run at those resolutions anyway.

[OmegaOmni]

Going up to MEPS today folks...I will post some time tomorrow when I get back home.

[Spectere]

Why would you want a square resolution in ZSNES? The Snes didn't run at those resolutions anyway.

256 vertical pixels would let you render at either PAL or NTSC and still give room for UI elements.

It might have also had greater compatibility with video hardware.  Oddball resolutions can be done on most monitors without a problem, but the video card needs to be able to be massaged into using it.